Statistics vs. Ptolemy
St. John’s College in Annapolis has structured a math program steeped in the classics. Math is studied as a liberal art by all the college’s undergraduates, not just those gifted in math.
By Susan Borden,
Managing Editor, The College Magazine
At St. John’s College in Annapolis, students in math tutorials work their way through Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton, and Lobachevsky. Meanwhile, in a large corporation in Washington, D.C., three recent St. John’s graduates are doing work normally reserved for individuals with doctoral degrees in economics.
Was it the symmetry of the spheres, the ingenuity of the ecliptic, the lucidity of Newton’s lemmas that prepared them for this demanding work?
Their boss, Eric Rosenblatt, a 1974 graduate of St. John’s and a vice president at Fannie Mae, says no.
Rosenblatt began hiring St. John’s alumni in 2000 and currently has a hand in the careers of eight Johnnies—as alumni are called—who work at Fannie Mae, the secondary market enterprise that makes mortgage money available for lenders. He expects to hire more graduates of the college, which structures its academic program around the great books of Western Civilization, even though he has some differences with mathematics at the college. At St. John’s, mathematics is studied as a liberal art. Together with the college’s laboratory program, mathematics prepares students to think about what it means to count and measure things in the universe.
Rosenblatt’s original decision to take a chance on the St. John’s graduates was in part because of a lingering affection for his alma mater, but mostly because it made good business sense. “Corporations live and die on good labor. I get paid because people who work for me make good decisions,” Rosenblatt says. “I decided that St. John’s would be a filter for employment. The students are intelligent and motivated. Although Fannie Mae has incredibly high standards, programming is something that, if you’re smart and you really want to do it, you probably can.”
Rosenblatt continues to do most of his hiring at the annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Association; the staff he finds there have doctoral degrees and meet his criteria. But they’re also expensive and not always willing to do the simple charts and tables that convey the most insight. He points with pride to Jon Lawless and Brian Shea, both of the college’s class of 2000, who started working just after they graduated.
Lawless and Shea are already competitive with staff members who have doctoral degrees, says Rosenblatt. “They started at around $50,000, but I’ll tell you something: they were worth more. I’m sending them to graduate school and over time their earnings and opportunities will climb.”
Although Rosenblatt has developed a win-win arrangement for Fannie Mae and St. John’s, he finds himself frustrated by what he sees as the limitations of the St. John’s math program.
“Students at St. John’s don’t have the typical math background of college graduates entering the social sciences. Sociology, experimental psychology, economics—these are all fields Johnnies would enjoy,” he says. “The prerequisites are a few years of calculus, statistics, maybe linear algebra. If they don’t have it, it seems like a daunting hill to climb, one more thing to keep them from targeting a career objective they would find satisfying and do well in.”
Harvey Flaumenhaft, St. John’s dean, says that it’s easy for graduates to acquire the math skills they need for careers. Learning to think and solve problems are more difficult but rewarding paths.
“A number of students go on to careers in math and science,” Flaumenhaft says. “For example, several recent graduates are now studying astrophysics at George Mason University. It’s true that we don’t do statistics, but our students can go to the community college and take elementary statistics for a semester. If we did statistics, we’d have to give up something else.
However, Flaumenhaft added, “The absence of their treatment does not mean that statistics are not important. There are a lot of important things we don’t study here. Not only things we should do, but things that it’s an outrage not to do. We can’t do everything—we have to make choices.”
John Lawless, now a Fannie Mae economist working toward a master’s of finance at George Washington University (paid for by Fannie Mae), suggests pages of additional problems to supplement classroom discussion. “The people with me in graduate school are not that smart,” he says. “The advantage they have is that they’ve seen a lot of this stuff before. They have a broad exposure to basic math.”
Lawless illustrates his grad-school handicap by bringing up the simple operation of multiplying exponents as part of an equation. “Of course I know how to do it. It’s simple. But I always have to take a second to remind myself how to do it. This makes high level math that much more difficult, having to translate such small things each time.”
Flaumenhaft agrees that St. John’s students may have to invest additional time before or during graduate school to acquire high-level mathematics. Their St. John’s foundation will have prepared them well to do so.
“If you’re interested in understanding and not immediate facility, if you’re interested in looking at what makes sense and is simple enough to be seen as harmonious and clear, something that is fundamental and fruitful enough to be important when you’re 18 or 19 years old, then this is far more important than getting what seems to be the most useful item in your tool kit.”
While he understands that math at St. John’s serves a lot of purposes, Rosenblatt believes “distilled modern math provides excellent mental training and also integrates and reinforces a variety of program readings and labs. Beyond that, it will concretely help Johnnies with their careers…why is Ptolemy more elegant or better training for future guardians than genuine calculus?”
Misha Hall, a 2000 graduate and data analyst at Fannie Mae, describes what she found at St. John’s:
“The way we go about studying Euclid in the first year is great. You have the chance to see the beauty of mathematics,” Hall says. “And Ptolemy is really interesting. By the end of the first semester you have to catch yourself, because you’ll end up saying that the earth really is in the center of the universe. Mathematics proves everything Ptolemy says; this makes you question the things that you assume, it makes you question numbers and statistics.”
Flaumenhaft echoes Hall’s case for the value of Ptolemy as an “important intellectual experience.”
“There’s the interplay of the world we see and the world we think, but it’s also a necessary prerequisite for appreciating the absolutely astounding fact that when you start thinking, you can end up with everything familiar looking altogether different.”
--Adapted from the summer 2002 edition of The College, the quarterly alumni magazine of St. John’s College. |
